CHARACTERISTICS OF PARK SCENERY.  
How delicious is our old park scenery! How wise that such places as Richmond, Greenwich, and such old parks in the neighbourhood of the Metropolis, are kept up and kept open, that our citizens may occasionally get out of the smoke and noise of the great Babel, and breathe all their freshness, and feel all their influence! Who does not often, in the midst of brick-and-mortar regions, summon up before his imagination this old park or forest scenery? The ferny or heathy slopes, under old, stately, gnarled oaks, or thorns as old, with ivy having stems nearly as thick as their own, climbing up them, and clinging to them, and sometimes incorporating itself so completely with their heads, as to make them look entirely ivy-trees. The footpaths, with turf short and soft as velvet, running through the bracken. The sunny silence that lies on the open glades and brown uplands; the cool breezy feeling under the shade; the grashopper chithering amongst the bents; the hawk hovering and whimpering over-head; the keeper lounging along in[303] velveteen jacket, and with his gun, at a distance, or firing at some destructive bird. The herds of deer, fallow or red, congregated beneath the shadow of the trees, or lying in the sun if not too warm, their quick ears and tails keeping up a perpetual twinkle; the belling of scattered deer, as they go bounding and mincing daintily across the openings, here and there,—the old ones hoarse and deep, the young shrill and plaintive. Cattle with whisking tails, grazing sedately; the woodpecker’s laughter from afar; the little tree-creeper running up the ancient boles, always beginning at the bottom, and going upwards with a quick, gliding, progress—the quaint cries of other birds and wild creatures, the daws and the rooks feeding together, and mingling their different voices of pert and grave accent. The squirrel running with extended tail along the ground, or flourishing it over his head, as he sits on the tree; or fixing himself, when suddenly come upon, in the attitude of an old, brown, decayed branch by the tree side, as motionless as the deadest branch in the forest. The hum of insects all around you, the low still murmur of sunny music,
Nature’s ceaseless hum,
Voice of the desert, never dumb.
The pheasant’s crow; the pheasant with all her brood springing around you, one by one, from the turf where you are standing amid the bracken—here one! there one! c............